The Story of Us
by A. K. Coxon
Summary: The year is 2016, and Ron Weasley sits his children down to tell them the story of how he met their mother.
1. Dad, how did you meet Mum?

p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Kids!"br /Two children ran down the spiral staircase, pushing and shoving to be the first down. br /The table was set and the plates were full with various meats and vegetables. The children sat at the large table and started eating hungrily, sometimes picking the food up with their tiny hands, discarding the silver knifes and /"Merlin, you can tell you are your father's children" their mother said, looking at her husband sat at the table with them, who mimicked the children's actions in every way apart from his hands were bigger and his actions were faster. His wife rolled her eyes and returned to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea before she sat down for dinner./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"After the meal, the children were sat in the lounge on the brown leather sofa, a routine only broken for homework and Christmas day. The girl had 'Standard book of spells, volume II' open in front of herand the boy had a muggle maze game he was frantically shaking to get the tiny silver ball into the /"Hugo, stop that" his sister asked as her father came in to the room and sat on the worn leather chair opposite them. The noise was annoying her and she couldnt hear herself think. She closed her book and looked at her father's worn /"Dad…" The girl /"Yes Rose?" Asked the man, combing his red hair with his fingers. The paper was open in front of him but his eyes were drifting shut. It had been a hard /"How did you meet mum?" she asked, reserving her voice in case her dad didnt feel like awnsering. br /"Pardon?" he asked, snapping out of his /"How did you meet mum?" br /The man paused and looked at his children, who were looking at him attentively. Surely they knew how he met their mother? He must have told them at least once in their short lives. But, as he looked at his children, their faces eager and young, he realised they had no idea. Sevral times the trio had told their children their favourite parts of the battle, the parts they had looked the most heroic or the parts where they were a knight in shining armour to a beautiful damsel in distress. The children had heard about their parents getting together after the war, but the cosy fireplace tales only told so much about their family. Another side to the war, the pain, the hurt, resentments and the deaths were omitted from the family's heroic tales for their children's safety and their own wounds that would reopen at the sheer mention of a lost loved /"Alright, this is the story of how I met your mother. It's long, its complicated and you may not want to hear some parts. But it happened and it made who we are today. Merlin, you two wouldn't be born without this story. You remove the story of how we met and the reason we got together and you remove you two from the world completely. Thanks to some people you nearly wouldn't be sat here today. But, here it is, the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth"br /The children got comfortable with the green cushions and focused on their father who was about to begin his story./p 


	2. It was 1991

p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""It was 1991. It was my first year at Hogwarts and I was at your Grandma and Granddad's, that's where I grew up. By that time, your uncles Bill and Charlie had left Hogwarts and they had both left an unusually big shadow to live up to. Bill was head boy and they both were prefects. Percy was acing every subject and he had just been made prefect too. Fred and George were in their 3rd year and were sort of infamous. See, your late uncle Fred and your uncle George were massive pranksters. When I look at James I see a bit of Fred and George in him. They were inseparable back then, and they continued to be until your uncle Fred died in the war"br /Ron winced. Rose bit her lip nervously. She'd never met her uncle Fred, but he was meant to be 'The greatest prankster Hogwarts had ever seen' according to her family and the proffesors and ghosts at Hogwarts, and also the apparent brains behind the genius that was Fred and George. It had been /p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Tell us more about Uncle Fred!" Hugo said, eager to know more. It had been 19 years since he had died and still talking about him made a lump form in Ron's throat. It was painful, every Christmas to lay a place for 'the brother they lost for freedom' and know that the seat will remain unoccupied as it's occupant hadnt been seen since 1997./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Ok, your uncle Fred. So he was born on the 1st April 1978, quite accurate really as it was April fool's day which was fitting because they were always game for a laugh. He was 7 minutes older than George, and obviously they were identical twins, apart from George had Dad's grin and Fred had Mum's. After they were born, your grandma recons they were nightmares. It was not uncommon for explosions and weird sounds coming from their shared bedroom. They were the closest out of all of us Wealsey kids and I wanted someone to be the Fred to my George in some ways. I guess I got that when your aunt was born, although she was a girl. When I was born, Fred was the one who first called me 'Ronnie' and then George followed. It was annoying. It's his fault I'm scared of spiders, actually. I was two and Fred turned my teddy bear in to a giant spider"br /Hugo giggled and so did Ron. It was weird, looking /"He gave me an acid pop and burned a hole in my tongue" Ron said, sticking his tongue out at his children for them to see the faint circle that could be seen on his pink tongue. They /"He broke my broomstick and even tried to make me take an Unbreakable Vow. Dad was so angry when he caught them. I've never seen him so angry or angry like that since, apart from when James blew up his shed last year. Fred and your uncle George set off a dung bomb under my Great-aunt's chair at Christmas once and she never came back. I think she wrote them out of her will too. The old bat only left me three books on potions and 5 galleons anyway, they got lucky"br /Rose tittered at her father, replicating her /"Ginny and I were Fred and George's favourites out of all of us really. Whenever Ginny helped them do something they got away with it because she was the only girl. Well, so long as it wasn't too bad, Mum and Dad wernt push overs. They blew up the cooker with dodgy fireworks and Mum didn't speak to them for three days. I think she made Ginny stay away from them so she didn't have bad influences. They were always blowing up stuff, I had to have three wardrobes because they exploded. Fred and George liked teasing me but at George's wedding George told me I was Fred's favourite among the rest of our brothers. None of them really cared for Percy too much because they were very loyal and Percy left the family because he thought he was higher than he was and Bill and Charlie wernt really there. So, that's your uncle Fred. A good man. He was sometimes misunderstood, but loyal and kind. You would have really liked him, I think"br /"I wish he didn't die" Hugo said, his eyes brimming with /"Me too. But that's the price of war, son"br /"I guess. So it was 1991...?" Rose said, urging her father to get back on the path./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Ah yes. It was 1991 when I met your mother. But we'll get to that in a bit. We were at King's Cross and Ginny was complaining because she couldn't go to Hogwarts too with me. It wasnt so bad when we both wernt going but now I was going she was more desperate. I had everything, the books, the robes, the wand and the quills. I even got to have the family's pet rat, Scabbers. Ginny was painfully jealous but with the reassurance that next year she'd be off with me to Hogwarts she calmed down, especially since Dad said that she could sit on his shoulders. Ginny used to love that. We were just about to go through the barrier between platforms 9 and 10 when we were stopped by a scruffy black haired boy wearing clothes that were 4 times bigger than his body and held by a ridiculous amount of safety pins and belts."/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Uncle Harry!" the children said in unison./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Yep. He had no idea how to get through to the platform and Mum showed him. After he'd left, Ginny swore that he was Harry Potter and she was right. Apparently she loved him at first sight, which I kind of knew because she wouldn't bloody shut up about him. I got on the train and there were no seats anywhere. I was scared, Fred and George had left me to go sit with their 3rd year friends and I had no one. I never needed other friends; I always had my brothers and Ginny. So anyway there was one compartment with only one boy sat in it, so I asked if I could sit with him. He didn't mind at all. We talked and he told me his name was Harry Potter, the boy who lived. We ten pigged out on all the sweets from the trolley that your uncle Harry brought. He has always been generous, even back then. Then, this random girl comes in and asks us if we have seen a frog. No wait! It was a toad, your Uncle Neville's toad called Toby. No wait, Trevor. Yeah that's it. We hadn't, because we were too busy eating liquorice wands and jelly slugs. She saw I was in the middle of doing a spell, which wasn't very good. In fact, it didn't work at all. She made fun of me and then did a spell to fix Uncle Harry's glasses. I hated her from the very second I met her and she drove me crazy for so many years."/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Who was the girl dad?"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Yeah, who was she?"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Your mother"/p 


	3. First Year

p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""You see kids, sometimes love doesn't just happen overnight. It takes time, and we are talking seven years here. When I first met your mother, she was annoying and a total know-it-all. Oh, and couldn't she nag! She still does, but she's not so bad now. She always told me I was doing something wrong and we never agreed on anything. I was gangly and freckly, a bit like Hugo looks now, but much bigger. I was the last Weasley boy to go to Hogwarts and I had quite a lot to prove. It's funny really, I was the most insecure of my brothers, so eager to outshine them and it was your mother and Harry who made me shine brighter than my brothers, even my sister. If it wasn't for your aunt's quidditch career I would be the most famous of my siblings"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"Hugo's eyes widened. His father, famous?/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Your mother was kind of small, even back then, a measly 4'8 to my 5'3. She had her brown hair in a sort of poof around her head, it was really bushy. I don't even know how to explain it. She always wore it down and she had a book glued in between her permanently crossed arms. She was uptight and stuck up, but after I upset her and made her cry, she locked herself in the girl's bathrooms and then a troll got in to the castle. Forgetting she was there, we locked the troll in the girl's bathrooms. Eventually we fought the troll and with my amazing skills we took it down. After that, we all became best friends and nothing's changed at all. Your mother still drove me insane though. That year, our first year was the start of our adventure and the first time we battled things beyond our years. We were 11, Harry and Hermione didn't have any magic growing up and even though your mother was brilliant and everything, we were young and didn't know how to make good decisions. The troll in the castle was just the beginning of the battle that we call 'The battle for the Philosopher's stone' You see, Our defence against the dark arts teacher, Professor Quirrell had a secret, but, you know this story"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"They did. This story was one of the tame ones the children were told at family gatherings when their father and Uncle Harry were a little tipsy on fire whiskey and they wanted to reminisce about their first proper adventure. The story was powerful, the very evil Lord Voldemort was taken down by love and there was nothing that it couldn't do./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""We defeat him and Voldemort with minimal injuries and your old dad almost gets murdered by a giant chess set. This story was the first of many, and it's how I came to love your mother. See, even back then we had tension. She told me that she didn't think of me like she did of your Uncle Harry; he was always like her brother. She couldn't understand why that didn't apply to me, but it wasn't until our fourth year that she realised why. But that bit will come later"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"Rose and Hugo thought for a moment./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""So, you met Mum on the train?" Hugo asked./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""I did indeed."/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Did you know you'd love her? I mean, you said you hated her when you met her but did you ever imagine that you would marry her and have us?" asked Rose./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Did I think I'd marry the girl who annoyed me to the point of ripping my hair out? No. But I did know that she would be a part of my life. I didn't have a clue just how important. Not only has she saved me, she gave me you guys. I love you, even when you're doing my head in with your bickering"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"Rose smiled and walked over to hug her dad. Her brother did the same. The three Weasley's were locked in a tight embrace. Ron loved his children. Hugo was his mini-me, always getting into scrapes with his cousins and eating enough to feed a few thousand people. Rose was incredibly clever, just like her mother but she had Ron's temper and Ron's keeper skills. Rose was a daddy's girl and Hugo was a mummy's boy. He wouldn't change anything he had now for the world./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Come on guys, bed now" Hermione said, walking into the room, crossing her cardigan to her body and looking mock-sternly at her husband and children. Ron kissed each child and sent them to bed, winking at his daughter, telepathically telling her that there was way more of his story to come. Hermione crossed the living room floor and snuggled next to Ron./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""So what were you and the kids talking about?" she asked her husband./p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Just stuff, they wanted me to tell them a story"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""Nothing scary right? I don't need Hugh up all night again"/p  
p style="font-family: BergamoStdRegular, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;""No, nothing too scary" Ron said, smiling to himself./p 


End file.
